Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy

by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Overview

Truth, reason, and objectivity—can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial—perhaps eternal—clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges—"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"—that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674064928
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/30/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Preface

The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics

Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions

Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account

Doing without Meaning

Unloading the Self-Refutation Charge

The Skeptic's Turn: A Performance of Contradiction

Arguing with Reason

Appendix: Webs of Reason

Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets

Science Studies

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.

Bruno Latour

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is not the UN peace-keeping forces intervening in the Science and Moral Wars. Rather, she does an ecological study of many entangled controversies, paying due attention to all the camps while not pretending to be above any of them--thus exemplifying the fact that relativism leads not, as many believe, to a lake of fire in which illegitimate scholars are inevitably fried, but to the open seas on which it is possible to travel much further than on the supposed solid ground of 'firm foundations,' if only we have ship!
— Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines, Paris

Richard Rorty

Smith's analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed.
— Richard Rorty, University of Virginia

Steven Shapin

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers--for those who really want one--an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.
— Steven Shapin, University of California at San Diego

Editorial Reviews

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is not the UN peace-keeping forces intervening in the Science and Moral Wars. Rather, she does an ecological study of many entangled controversies, paying due attention to all the camps while not pretending to be above any of them—thus exemplifying the fact that relativism leads not, as many believe, to a lake of fire in which illegitimate scholars are inevitably fried, but to the open seas on which it is possible to travel much further than on the supposed solid ground of ‘firm foundations,’ if only we have a ship!

Bruno Latour

Sober and wise, engaged yet tolerant, this book offers—for those who really want one—an antidote to the absolutism and the incivility of our present controversies.

Steven Shapin

It is typical of Smith that she can accommodate such questions of reality and truth, without self-contradiction, in the course of a defence and explication of what is variously called scepticism, perspectivism, constructivism or postmodernism, but for which relativism seems a perfectly good term. Belief and Resistance is not only a substantively powerful book; its conscientious approach and restrained style are equally welcome. Indeed, its only possible rivals are the work of Joseph Margolis…and the late, unjustly neglected Paul Feyerabend… Smith’s point is not that there is anything wrong about objectivity in the classic sense of ‘justifiable in a context-transcendent and subject-independent way’. It is, rather, that whether legal, scientific, or political, such evaluation—‘as distinct from judgments that are good under certain (perhaps quite broad) conditions and from the perspectives of certain (perhaps especially relevant) people’—never occurs. In epistemology and axiology, there are ‘no touchstones of truth, no automatic refutations of error, no ready-made exposures of deception’. In rich and subtle detail, Smith explores the implications of this view in relation to (among other things) Holocaust denial and the ‘Science Wars’. Proceeding from the view that what we variously call nature, reality, or truth is the result of ongoing material, cognitive, conceptual and social interactions (but not social or linguistic alone), she offers some fascinating speculations on the general dynamics of belief and resistance. Their overall context is the project of a naturalized but non-reductive evolutionary epistemology, very much in the spirit of Gregory Bateson. Barbara Hernnstein Smith’s book, however, sets a new standard.

Times Literary Supplement - Patrick Curry

Smith’s analyses of recent controversies about objectivity are unusually subtle, and very helpful indeed.

Richard Rorty

It is typical of Smith that she can accommodate such questions of reality and truth, without self-contradiction, in the course of a defence and explication of what is variously called scepticism, perspectivism, constructivism or postmodernism, but for which relativism seems a perfectly good term. Belief and Resistance is not only a substantively powerful book; its conscientious approach and restrained style are equally welcome. Indeed, its only possible rivals are the work of Joseph Margolis...and the late, unjustly neglected Paul Feyerabend...Smith's point is not that there is anything wrong about objectivity in the classic sense of 'justifiable in a context-transcendent and subject-independent way'. It is, rather, that whether legal, scientific, or political, such evaluation--'as distinct from judgments that are good under certain (perhaps quite broad) conditions and from the perspectives of certain (perhaps especially relevant) people'--never occurs. In epistemology and axiology, there are 'no touchstones of truth, no automatic refutations of error, no ready-made exposures of deception'. In rich and subtle detail, Smith explores the implications of this view in relation to (among other things) Holocaust denial and the 'Science Wars'. Proceeding from the view that what we variously call nature, reality, or truth is the result of ongoing material, cognitive, conceptual and social interactions (but not social or linguistic alone), she offers some fascinating speculations on the general dynamics of belief and resistance. Their overall context is the project of a naturalized but non-reductive evolutionary epistemology, very much in the spirit of Gregory Bateson. Barbara Hernnstein Smith's book, however, sets a new standard.
— Patrick Curry

Times Literary Supplement